"Are you leading up to the announcement that you are going to kill me?" She looked him straight in the eyes, and began to shiver as if she was very cold.
"Wouldn't that be best," he asked, "for everybody concerned?"
"I swear to God I won't give anything away," she said.
He continued to smile in her face. "I could do it for you," he said, "so delicately--so painlessly--with my hands--and your troubles would be all over."
He took her slender white neck between the palms of his great hairy hands and caressed it. She did not shrink from his touch.
"Rose," he said presently and with the brutal and tigerish quality gone from his voice, "you're brave. But I know women too well. I don't trust you. If you'd screamed then or shown fear in any way, you'd be dead now. After the 15th you shall do what you please with your life. Meanwhile, my dear, lock and key for yours."
"You'll come to see me sometimes?"
"After to-night, I shall be laid up for a while, growing a pair of legs. Later I'll look in, now and then. How about a little music, before you retire to your room for the next few months? I'll tell you a secret. I'm nervous about to-night, and frightened. A little Beethoven? to soothe our nerves? the Adagio from the Pathétique?"
He stumped beside her, holding her hand as a child holds that of its nurse; but for a different reason.
That night, securely locked in her own room next to his, she slept at last from sheer weariness. And she dreamed that he was playing to her, for her--the Adagio, and then the "Funeral March of a Hero."